zaterdag 14 juli 2018

IS DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM now in the “ascendant” in the Democratic Party? That was the question posed by a reporter to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi last week, in the wake of democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s shock primary victory in New York’s 14th Congressional District.

And Pelosi’s response? “No.”

Elaborating a bit, she qualified that “it’s ascendant in that district perhaps. But I don’t accept any characterization of our party presented by the Republicans. So let me reject that right now.”

Who is she kidding? Ocasio-Cortez, a “Democratic giant slayer” (New York Times) who “rocked the political world” (CBS News), is now a household name. From the pages of Vogue to the studios of ABC’s “The View” and CBS’s “Late Show,” the Democrats’ newest star has been eloquently explaining — and detoxifying — democratic socialism to millions of apolitical Americans. “No person should be too poor to live,” she told Stephen Colbert, to cheers and applause, when asked to define her ideology.

Not Pelosi, that’s for sure. Democratic leaders of her generation are accustomed to seeing political messaging from a defensive posture only. So it wasn’t surprising that Pelosi would reject democratic socialism as a “characterization of our party presented by the Republicans,” when the characterization is being presented, in reality, by Democrats themselves.

So here’s a question for the House minority leader: If socialism isn’t “ascendant” in her party, why did 16 Democratic senators join with Sanders in September 2017 to introduce his Medicare For All Act, a bill “enthusiastically” endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America? Lest we forget, only four years earlier, Sanders introduced a similar bill in the Senate that had zero Democratic co-sponsors.

Here are a couple of other questions for Pelosi to consider: If socialism isn’t “ascendent” in her party, why did nearly six in 10 Democratic primary voters in 2016 say it has a “positive impact on society” and four in 10Democratic caucus-goers in Iowa describe themselves as socialists? Why did the New York Times publish a piece in April that was headlined, “‘Yes, I’m Running as a Socialist.’ Why Candidates Are Embracing the Label in 2018”?

Of course, this isn’t socialism of the totalitarian or even Marxist variety. Even by European standards, it’s pretty tame: Neither Sanders nor Ocasio-Cortez is echoing British Labour Party leader and proud socialist Jeremy Corbyn’s call for the nationalization of public utilities. “Many socialist candidates sound less like revolutionaries and more like traditional Democrats,” acknowledged the New York Times. “They want single-payer health care, a higher minimum wage, and greater protections for unions.” (Although Ocasio-Cortez did pay homage to Corbyn in her viral campaign ad, intoning that “a New York for the many is possible,” a phrase Corbyn himself borrowed from Percy Shelley.)

Nevertheless, leading Democrats have, for many decades now, run a mile from the socialist label. “We’re capitalists, and that’s just the way it is,” Pelosi told a CNN town hall audience last year, when confronted by a student who asked her if the Democrats “could move farther left to a more populist message.” An anxious Barack Obama once called a reporter who had asked him whether he was a socialist to say it was “hard … to believe that you were entirely serious about that socialist question.” Hillary Clinton recently complained that her embrace of the label “capitalist” during the campaign “probably” hurt her in the 2016 campaign among Democrats.

Yet the modern, liberal, progressive America that is so cherished by Obama, Pelosi, and the rest of the Democratic Party elites might not exist today — were it not for socialists!

The modern, liberal, progressive America that is so cherished by Democratic Party elites might not exist today — were it not for socialists!

TAKE THE NEW Deal. “FDR’s borrowing of ideas about Social Security, unemployment compensation, jobs programs and agricultural assistance from the Socialists was sufficient to pull voters who had rejected the Democrats in 1932 into the New Deal Coalition that would sweep the congressional elections of 1934 and reelect the president with … the largest Electoral College win in the history of two-party politics,” writes John Nichols in his book “The S Word: A Short History of an American Tradition…Socialism.” Elsewhere, Nichols cites a 1954 New York Times profile of Norman Thomas, six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America, which described him as having made “a great contribution in pioneering ideas that have now won the support of both major parties,” including “Social Security, public housing, public power developments, legal protection for collective bargaining and other attributes of the welfare state.”

How about the war on poverty?

In 1962, socialist intellectual Michael Harrington — who would later go on to found the Democratic Socialists of America — published “The Other America: Poverty in the United States” and it became an instant classic. “Among the book’s readers, reputedly, was John F. Kennedy, who in the fall of 1963 began thinking about proposing anti­poverty legislation,” wrote Harrington’s biographer Maurice Isserman. “After Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson took up the issue, calling in his 1964 State of the Union address for an ‘unconditional war on poverty.’ Sargent Shriver headed the task force charged with drawing up the legislation, and invited Harrington to Washington as a consultant.”

Then there is the civil rights struggle.

The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, at which Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, was organized by proud democratic socialists Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph. King himself would later remark that “something is wrong … with capitalism” and “there must be a better distribution of wealth.” “Maybe,” he suggested, “America must move toward a democratic socialism.”

Go beyond politics, too.

“It’s kind of ironic,” Nate Silver once remarked, “American sports are socialist.” Consider the NFL, which operates a strict salary cap for players, while also ensuring that each NFL team receives an equal share of the league’s revenue from TV deals. To quote Art Modell, the late owner of the Cleveland Browns, the league is run by “a bunch of fat-cat Republicans who vote socialist on football.”

It is also worth noting that while the “s-word” may still bother a majority of Americans, especially older Americans, socialist policies are pretty popular across the board — including with plenty of Republicans. Writing for New York magazine’s Daily Intelligencer, and citing a poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation, Eric Levitz points out that “a majority of voters in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania would all support a socialist takeover of the health-insurance industry (so long as you didn’t put the idea to them in those terms).” He also observes that the “most radical economic policy on Ocasio-Cortez’s platform — a federal job guarantee — meanwhile, actually polls quite well in ‘flyover country.’”

So, what is Pelosi so afraid of? The way in which Republicans have turned “socialist” into a smear and a slur? Who cares? They’ve done the same to “liberal” — yet that hasn’t stopped Pelosi from identifying herself as one.

At the very minimum, even if the House minority leader doesn’t agree with the chair of the Democratic National Committee that democratic socialist Ocasio-Cortez represents “the future of our party,” she should stop being so defensive. Perhaps Pelosi could learn a lesson from President Harry Truman. The conservative Democrat and proud Cold Warrior was dubbed — yes, you guessed it — a “socialist” by his GOP opponents in 1950. “Out of the great progress of this country, out of our great advances in achieving a better life for all, out of our rise to world leadership, the Republican leaders have learned nothing,” responded a defiant Truman. “Confronted by the great record of this country, and the tremendous promise of its future, all they do is croak, ‘socialism.’”

Top photo: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi looks on during a press conference at the Dr. George W. Davis Senior Center on February 21, 2018, in San Francisco, California.

The Holes in the Official Skripal Story

Craig MURRAY

In my last post I set out the official Government account of the events in the Skripal Case. Here I examine the credibility of this story. Next week I shall look at alternative explanations.

Russia has a decade long secret programme of producing and stockpiling novichok nerve agents. It also has been training agents in secret assassination techniques, and British intelligence has a copy of the Russian training manual, which includes instruction on painting nerve agent on doorknobs.

The only backing for this statement by Boris Johnson is alleged “intelligence”, and unfortunately the “intelligence” about Russia’s secret novichok programme comes from exactly the same people who brought you the intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s WMD programme, proven liars. Furthermore, the question arises why Britain has been sitting on this intelligence for a decade and doing nothing about it, including not telling the OPCW inspectors who certified Russia’s chemical weapons stocks as dismantled.

If Russia really has a professional novichok assassin training programme, why was the assassination so badly botched? Surely in a decade of development they would have discovered that the alleged method of gel on doorknob did not work? And where is the training manual which Boris Johnson claimed to possess? Having told the world – including Russia -the UK has it, what is stopping the UK from producing it, with marks that could identify the specific copy erased?

The Russians chose to use this assassination programme to target Sergei Skripal, a double agent who had been released from jail in Russia some eight years previously.

It seems remarkable that the chosen target of an attempt that would blow the existence of a secret weapon and end the cover of a decade long programme, should be nobody more prominent than a middle ranking double agent who the Russians let out of jail years ago. If they wanted him dead they could have killed him then. Furthermore the attack on him would undermine all future possible spy swaps. Putin therefore, on this reading, was willing to sacrifice both the secrecy of the novichok programme and the spy swap card just to attack Sergei Skripal. That seems highly improbable.

Only the Russians can make novichok and only the Russians had a motive to attack the Skripals.

The nub of the British government’s approach has been the shocking willingness of the corporate and state media to parrot repeatedly the lie that the nerve agent was Russian made, even after Porton Down said they could not tell where it was made and the OPCW confirmed that finding. In fact, while the Soviet Union did develop the “novichok” class of nerve agents, the programme involved scientists from all over the Soviet Union, especially Ukraine, Armenia and Georgia, as I myself learnt when I visited the newly decommissioned Nukus testing facility in Uzbekistan in 2002.

Furthermore, it was the USA who decommissioned the facility and removed equipment back to the United States. At least two key scientists from the programme moved to the United States. Formulae for several novichok have been published for over a decade. The USA, UK and Iran have definitely synthesised a number of novichok formulae and almost certainly others have done so too. Dozens of states have the ability to produce novichok, as do many sophisticated non-state actors.

As for motive, the Russian motive might be revenge, but whether that really outweighs the international opprobrium incurred just ahead of the World Cup, in which so much prestige has been invested, is unclear.

What is certainly untrue is that only Russia has a motive. The obvious motive is to attempt to blame and discredit Russia. Those who might wish to do this include Ukraine and Georgia, with both of which Russia is in territorial dispute, and those states and jihadist groups with which Russia is in conflict in Syria. The NATO military industrial complex also obviously has a plain motive for fueling tension with Russia.

There is of course the possibility that Skripal was attacked by a private gangster interest with which he was in conflict, or that the attack was linked to Skripal’s MI6 handler Pablo Miller’s work on the Orbis/Steele Russiagate dossier on Donald Trump.

Plainly, the British governments statements that only Russia had the means and only Russia had the motive, are massive lies on both counts.

The Russians had been tapping the phone of Yulia Skripal. They decided to attack Sergei Skripal while his daughter was visiting from Moscow.

In an effort to shore up the government narrative, at the time of the Amesbury attack the security services put out through Pablo Miller’s long term friend, the BBC’s Mark Urban, that the Russians “may have been” tapping Yulia Skripal’s phone, and the claim that this was strong evidence that the Russians had indeed been behind the attack.

But think this through. If that were true, then the Russians deliberately attacked at a time when Yulia was in the UK rather than when Sergei was alone. Yet no motive has been adduced for an attack on Yulia or why they would attack while Yulia was visiting – they could have painted his doorknob with less fear of discovery anytime he was alone. Furthermore, it is pretty natural that Russian intelligence would tap the phone of Yulia, and of Sergei if they could. The family of double agents are normal targets. I have no doubt in the least, from decades of experience as a British diplomat, that GCHQ have been tapping Yulia’s phone. Indeed, if tapping of phones is seriously put forward as evidence of intent to murder, the British government must be very murderous indeed.

Their trained assassin(s) painted a novichok on the doorknob of the Skripal house in the suburbs of Salisbury. Either before or after the attack, they entered a public place in the centre of Salisbury and left a sealed container of the novichok there.

The incompetence of the assassination beggars belief when compared to British claims of a long term production and training programme. The Russians built the heart of the International Space Station. They can kill an old bloke in Salisbury. Why did the Russians not know that the dose from the door handle was not fatal? Why would trained assassins leave crucial evidence lying around in a public place in Salisbury? Why would they be conducting any part of the operation with the novichok in a public area in central Salisbury?

Why did nobody see them painting the doorknob? This must have involved wearing protective gear, which would look out of place in a Salisbury suburb. With Skripal being resettled by MI6, and a former intelligence officer himself, it beggars belief that MI6 did not fit, as standard, some basic security including a security camera on his house.

The Skripals both touched the doorknob and both functioned perfectly normally for at least five hours, even able to eat and drink heartily. Then they were simultaneously and instantaneously struck down by the nerve agent, at a spot in the city centre coincidentally close to where the assassins left a sealed container of the novichok lying around. Even though the nerve agent was eight times more deadly than Sarin or VX, it did not kill the Skripals because it had been on the doorknob and affected by rain.

Why did they both touch the outside doorknob in exiting and closing the door? Why did the novichok act so very slowly, with evidently no feeling of ill health for at least five hours, and then how did it strike both down absolutely simultaneously, so that neither can call for help, despite their being different sexes, weights, ages, metabolisms and receiving random completely uncontrolled doses. The odds of that happening are virtually nil. And why was the nerve agent ultimately ineffective?

Detective Sergeant Bailey attended the Skripal house and was also poisoned by the doorknob, but more lightly. None of the other police who attended the house were affected.

Why was the Detective Sergeant affected and nobody else who attended the house, or the scene where the Skripals were found? Why was Bailey only lightly affected by this extremely deadly substance, of which a tiny amount can kill?

Four months later, Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgess were rooting about in public parks, possibly looking for cigarette butts, and accidentally came into contact with the sealed container of a novichok. They were poisoned and Dawn Sturgess subsequently died.

If the nerve agent had survived four months because it was in a sealed container, why has this sealed container now mysteriously disappeared again? If Rowley and Sturgess had direct contact straight from the container, why did they not both die quickly? Why had four months searching of Salisbury and a massive police, security service and military operation not found this container, if Rowley and Sturgess could?

I am, with a few simple questions, demolishing what is the most ludicrous conspiracy theory I have ever heard – the Salisbury conspiracy theory being put forward by the British government and its corporate lackies.

My next post will consider some more plausible explanations of this affair.

Jean-Claude Juncker can’t shake off Luxembourg’s tax controversy

The tax deals offered to major companies by Luxembourg during Jean-Claude Juncker’s time as prime minister are being investigated by his own organisation as illegal state aid – and have outraged the nations he is supposed to unite

Before he could get an answer out, she had another question: “Do you have books in Luxembourg?” The answer was no. “So you are telling me that the bills are printed in Luxembourg?” inquired an increasingly incredulous Hodge. The bills, the sheepish director explained, were printed in one of Amazon’s UK warehouses.

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But yes, all sales to British customers on the amazon.co.uk website were, for tax purposes, transactions that technically took place in the grand duchy.

The equally impatient Conservative MP Stephen Barclay waded in. “So what is the effective tax rate that you pay in Luxembourg?” he asked. That proved too tricky to answer. Barclay seized on other figures: sales of €9.1bn that generated only €20m of profit “suggests you are stripping out the profit in Luxembourg”.

Two years on, the outgoing commission vice-president Joaquín Almunia revealed he had launched a probe into exactly the matter Barclay had raised. That was three weeks before the new president of the European commission took office – Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg’s former prime minister.

Investigators are examining whether a 2003 tax ruling secured in Juncker-run Luxembourg was so generous to Amazon as to amount to illegal state aid on the part of the tiny nation. Had news of Almunia’s investigation been rushed out for fear that the incoming Juncker would otherwise have sought to kill it?

Certainly, back in 2003, as Luxembourg’s prime minister and finance minister, Juncker had proudly taken the credit for having successfully courted Amazon investment — though in recent weeks he has claimed he had nothing to do with the 2003 tax deal.

His latest defence of the tax culture he created, transforming Luxembourg into a honey pot for multinational corporations, has gone further and he now says that the grand duchy’s past courtship of big business was no different to that of other nations. Moreover, all Luxembourg tax rulings given to multinationals were within the law — a claim that appears uncomfortably close to prejudging the Almunia-instigated inquiry into suspected illegal state aid.

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If the Amazon investigation were not enough of a headache for the new commission president, a host of similar spectres from his past have returned to haunt him. Days after he took office The Guardian and more than 20 publications in other countries, working through the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, simultaneously published investigations and hundreds of confidential tax rulings secured for multinationals by tax advisers at PricewaterhouseCoopers. In many cases it was clear that these private deals rubber-stamped highly aggressive tax avoidance structures, sapping the tax receipts of other nations.

Once again, Hodge had a simple question: “How can we know he’s working in the interest of Europe when as prime minister in Luxembourg he has exploited populations in every European country and elsewhere for decades?”

Back in Strasbourg there was criticism from both left and right, though when it came to a censure motion last month, critics on the left eventually refused to join calls from a band of far-right parties for him to go. Juncker assured MEPs he was “no friend to big capital”, insisting the “problem is not peculiarly Luxembourg, it is Europe”.

Finance ministers of France, Germany and Italy, meanwhile, were so outraged that they wrote to the commission demanding an urgent tax avoidance crackdown. “Since certain tax practices of countries and taxpayers have become public recently, the limits of permissible tax competition between member states have shifted. This development is irreversible.”

Tax deals for well-known firms Shire, Icap, Skype, Ikea, Fedex, GlaxoSmithKline, Accenture, Reckitt Benckiser, Disney, Pearson, Taylor Wimpey and Burberry have all been published. In many cases the elaborate artifice of the corporate structuring was told pictorially in head-spinning organograms.

The truth about the industrial scale of tax deals rubber-stamped by Luxembourg’s tax office during the Juncker administration was becoming harder to ignore.

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Ironically, investigators in Almunia’s former department were still struggling to get copies of such agreements through official requests, and have been forced to take the grand duchy to the European courts, where infringement proceedings are ongoing.

Once again Juncker was forced into a round of media interviews to justify his past. “I don’t think I should be treated in isolation, detached from the actions of others,” he told Libération. “This is not a noble excuse, but everyone was at fault.” Speaking to The Guardian, he said: “I am not naive, not a village idiot, and I have to objectively take on board that many people in Europe now have doubts about the honourable side of the new commission president. I have to live with that.”

Particularly damaging were reports that in 2003 he had personally met a team including Amazon’s then main tax negotiator, Bob Comfort. Comfort, recalled in an interview with the Luxembourg newspaper d’Lëtzebuerger Land: “His message was simply: ‘If you encounter problems which you don’t seem to be able to resolve, please come back and tell me. I’ll try to help.’”

In 2011, more than two years before Juncker stepped down as prime minister, Luxembourg appointed Comfort to the curious-sounding role of the grand duchy’s “honorary consul for the Seattle area”. An unpaid job, the tax expert explained, this role was “to help attract business to Luxembourg”.

Asked about his past meetings with such figures considering investments in the grand duchy, Juncker said: “I had contact with several, but not all of the firms mentioned. But I never interfered in the special tax rulings because under the law a Luxembourg finance minister is not allowed to. He is not allowed to influence the form of a specific tax file.”

Reflecting more philosophically on his time as Luxembourg prime minister, the commission president has, on occasion sought to remind critics of the historical context in which he led efforts to attract inward investment.

“Tax decisions were taken by the tax administration and not by the government. But of course we were promoting this and we were negotiating with these companies, as others did – the Irish, the Dutch; to some extent the Belgians.”

The son of a steelworker, Juncker had seen at first hand the crisis that could engulf a tiny country reliant on one industry when in the 1970s the steel sector crashed. “We tried with all means – but not with illegal means – to diversify our economy,” he said.

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Persuading Goodyear and DuPont to set up European headquarters in the grand duchy were among the first big inward investment wins. Ernst & Young tax practice leader Marc Schmitz writes in his book Luxembourg in International Tax Planning: “Since Luxembourg has traditionally been open to foreign investment, its tax authorities have developed a tradition of being open to dialogue, and of understanding investors’ underlying business needs”.

This model has brought considerable success to the grand duchy’s population of just 550,000 — 45% are foreigners — as well as the many tens of thousands who commute to work there every day from Germany, Belgium and France.

One of the first Luxembourg-based firms to gain access to UK markets remotely — a precursor to the Amazon model — was Radio Luxembourg, later RTL. It was able to circumvent UK laws designed to give the BBC a monopoly of the airwaves, while at the same time reaching huge audiences thanks to what was then the world’s most powerful privately owned transmitter.

Later Luxembourg was found to have played a crucial role in the scandalous collapse of the fraud-riddled Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), which left behind debts of $10bn. The lender had enjoyed explosive growth in the UK in the 1980s, with regulatory supervisors at the Bank of England washing their hands of responsibility right up to its failure in 1991. Though run from offices in the City of London, the bank was officially headquartered in Luxembourg – albeit with little more than a letterbox presence.

As early as 1982, one internal memo by a supervisor at the Bank of England described BCCI as “on its way to becoming the financial equivalent of the SS Titanic!” Another said its status as a Luxembourg bank “has always been something of a fiction … I believe it would be wrong for us to continue to allow a large international banking group to carry on business on a largely unsupervised basis”. Ultimately, their views were not acted on.

On its immediate borders too, Luxembourg has found innovative ways to draw in custom from neighbouring states. Low duty on petrol, cigarettes and alcohol have for decades seen hordes of shoppers hopping over the border for a bargain.

While many in Luxembourg share Juncker’s sense that the nation is being unfairly singled out, there has been the occasional dissenting voice. Attracting particular controversy was a comment article in the Luxemburger Wort, a paper traditionally supportive of Juncker. “We’ve been living at the expense of others. Not just other states, but other people, like ourselves, who have been paying their taxes, while corporations in their own countries have been dodging them,” wrote the authors, an academic and a diplomat. “It is no longer possible to pretend that the Luxembourgish model has no negative consequences for other countries.”